Speech recognition, in which speech is translated to text, is currently a computationally intensive task. Additionally, much of the recognition is performed in software. For a personal computer or a workstation, recognition of the speech of a single person generally does not adversely affect the operation of the computer. This is true because the person usually has only the speech recognition system running, along with perhaps a word processor. Moreover, current processors are quite fast and memory is relatively inexpensive.
However, for some systems, such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), speech recognition is problematic. Similar devices include other small, hand-held devices and set-top boxes. These devices generally do not contain enough processing power to run a speech recognizer and other software. Consequently, speech recognition is relatively unused on these devices.
Another system that can have problems with speech recognition is a large-scale recognition system. In this type of system, multiple utterances from different speakers are translated to text simultaneously. While it is possible to purchase larger and faster systems in order to help translate this amount of speech, it would be beneficial to reduce the load on the processors of the system when the system performs speech recognition. The latter would allow the system to use the extra processing power on other tasks or to accommodate additional simultaneous speakers.
Consequently, a need exists for techniques to reduce the computational load of a processor during speech recognition.